We get so many developer tooling products thrown at us, either for free or dirt cheap, that over the decades it's conditioned us to assign much less monetary value to developer tooling products compared to what a simple opportunity cost analysis would yield, given the high monetary value of our time.
I certainly suffered from this myself to a rather extreme degree in the past, having categorically refused to pay a single cent for anything I used to build side projects with, until I started to seriously think about pricing for my own product. Eventually I realized throwing money at almost any problem where it could buy me more free time should be a no-brainer considering how highly I value my free time.
Tangentially, I think there's an interesting analogue in here to what Steam did in the PC games market, but I digress...
I certainly suffered from this myself to a rather extreme degree in the past, having categorically refused to pay a single cent for anything I used to build side projects with, until I started to seriously think about pricing for my own product. Eventually I realized throwing money at almost any problem where it could buy me more free time should be a no-brainer considering how highly I value my free time.
Tangentially, I think there's an interesting analogue in here to what Steam did in the PC games market, but I digress...